Robert Hellenga

Margot Harrington, an expert at book conservancy, discovers a volume of sixteen erotic drawings by Giulio Romano accompanying sixteen steamy sonnets by Pietro Aretino in a convent library. When published over four centuries earlier, the Vatican had insisted all copies be destroyed. This one--now unique--volume has survived.

Margot Harrington, an American book restorer living in Florence, Italy, must confront her ideas about the past, love, home, and her future when production begins on a movie based on a memoir she wrote twenty-five years earlier about her discovery of a masterwork of Renaissance erotica and her affair with a married Italian lover.